'Same Moon,' Seen From Cloud Nine

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For Riggen, this entree into Hollywood is not exactly a welcome to America -- she's been here several years -- but it's a welcome to a very weird and special part of the American soul. So let's sit back and listen to immigrant stories, where life and art meet and diverge, over designer water and excellent chocolate cake for energy. Where are Los Tigres del Norte when we need them? The popular Mexican American troubadours could make up a song about all this, like the one they wrote for the movie soundtrack:

Por amor es que voy a cruzar la frontera sin miedo. . .

[For love I'm going to cross the border without fear . . .]

Riggen, Riggen . . . the name doesn't ring Mexican, does it?

"Irish," she says, laughing.

Turns out that generations ago her people immigrated to the United States, and her great-grandfather fought in the Civil War. Then that same loco great-gramps, William Henry Riggen, lit out to make a new life -- in Mexico. No word on whether he had proper immigration papers.

A century later, Riggen grows up in Guadalajara, daughter of a surgeon father and a poet-playwright mother. She dabbles in journalism, works in film as a writer and producer. She's frustrated that although women in Mexico are accepted as writers and producers, there aren't many paths to becoming a director. It's like being "an astronaut," she says. She gets a visa to study film at Columbia University, class of 2003. A fine school, but it's really the city that lures her: New York! Fabulous.

"I watched Woody Allen and Scorsese movies," she says. "It's the dream city for me. It meant so many things. I'm a woman from Mexico. It meant liberation in a way, and being part of the world. . . . I moved to another country to look for something better."

Her student film "La Milpa" -- "The Cornfield," about a grandmother remembering younger days during the Mexican Revolution -- wins so many awards -- Student Academy Award Gold Medal, student Emmy, student Director's Guild citation -- that she quickly scores a work visa to replace her student visa. She also makes "Family Portrait," a short documentary about a poor family in Harlem, which wins a jury prize at Sundance in 2005.

She knows how improbable and lucky this all sounds, compared with the fictional characters in her new film -- or compared with so many of her real countrymen, emptying towns to reach the United States, one way or another. "It was a very different immigrant experience because it was to find a creative place for me," she says, "not to survive." A film school contact puts her in touch with Ligiah Villalobos, head writer on Nickelodeon's "Go, Diego! Go!" She has a script that, many drafts later, with notes from Riggen, becomes "Moon."

Let's hit pause on the cake scene to give Villalobos a call.